I am a scientist working at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL). My research interests span the areas of network science, multilayer systems, computational modeling and big data analytics. A common thread in my research is in understanding the theory and quantification of the interplay between physical infrastructures, information and human (social) activity. I received both my Bachelor (2006) and my Master (2009) in Environmental Engineering from the University of Florence.  I then received my Ph.D. in Complex Systems and Nonlinear Dynamics in 2014 from the Dept. of Information Engineering and Dept. of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Florence. Throughout my research experience, I have pursued challenging research projects across disciplines. For example, I worked for three years in a Complex Systems and Nonlinear Dynamics Lab in Florence (Italy), and six months at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin, Germany) within a team of psychologists and cognitive scientists. The main activity during my PhD was to develop cognitive-inspired models to study both the structure and the dynamics in complex networks. My main contribution was to analyze the interaction between information and epidemic spreading in multiplex networks. After defending my PhD thesis, I joined the Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering Carnegie Mellon University as a Postdoctoral Associate (March 2014), working jointly with the Risk and Decision Science Team of US Army Corps of Engineer. My main contribution was to merge the concept of resilience, as defined in the field of engineering with standard network failure dynamics, with the goal of quantifying the resilience of multilayer networks under stress. During this project, I supervised a team through the project’s simulation and computational modeling phases. In parallel, I also worked on another resilience and network science project, introducing the same definition of resilience in epidemic modeling. From 2014 to 2016 I have been employed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this role, I was focused on fundamental and applied research that relates to quantifying, modelling and predicting human behavior within urban environments. More broadly, I worked in a highly collaborative fashion with the lab’s multidisciplinary team, external research groups and industrial partners on topics including mobility, social interactions, economic activity and epidemic modelling.

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